And so, the climax of my 2015 visit to
Salzburg: my first ever hearing in the flesh of Répons. Sadly, I shall almost certainly never hear it conducted by
the composer, save for on his Deutsche Grammophon recording (invaluable, but no
replacement for the real thing). However, the superlative Ensemble
Intercontemporain did Boulez as proud under Matthias Pintscher as I am sure
they would have done the composer himself. To hear a work ‘live’ is always a
different matter from hearing a recording, but a work in which spatial considerations
are so crucial can only truly be heard like this. At any rate, the Salzburg
Festival’s performances, in the Lehrbauhof, will surely be something I shall
remember for the rest of my life. Every single performer struck me as
contributing something nearly super-human. If I single none of them out, it is
because my experience was such that it would be unfair to do so, not because
they do not all deserve to be named.

As has often been the case, the work was
performed twice. Each ticket had two different placements, enabling one to hear the work – and for once, this is
no cliché – anew. Seated behind the orchestra (in section ‘D’) for the first
half, I not only found the Introduction considerably sharper, also more
‘orchestral’ in the second half (section ‘A’), something which, I admit, might also
have been simply a matter of a second hearing. As the work progressed, lines,
sonorities, combinations emerged such as I truly do not think it would have
been possible for me to have heard earlier. What also struck me forcefully was
not only the – obvious, yet still interesting – thematic kinship with Dérive 2, of which I had had my ‘breakthrough’ hearing from the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra and DanielBarenboim earlier in the week. The difference in compositional method and the
multiplicity of possibilities, some realised, many more yet to be realised,
were no matter of theoretical reflection, not that there is any reason to
slight such activity; the seemingly endless possibilities inherent and immanent
in the material lived, struggled, sometimes even won out in my ears and in my
imagination. Or so I flattered myself – but I do not think that was mere idle
self-flattery, for such was genuinely my experience as this rich aural tapestry
was spun. (Mention of tapestry has me recall a fleeting thought that Boulez’s
late enthusiasm for Szymanowski – he knew some before, I know, but did little
about it – may have been ignited here. Fanciful, doubtless, but why not spin a
few more connections?)

Drama, just as in, say, an excellent
performance of Structures 2, was
everywhere: almost as if it could be instantiated in several dimensions at
once. (I realise I am speaking nonsense, at least according to one
understanding, but nonsense sometimes has its uses.) The truth of Boulez’s
claim that his later work would have been inconceivable without his conducting
of Wagner and Mahler was triumphantly vindicated; this work-in-progress – we
sometimes forget that she score as it
stands gives the date, tantalisingly as ‘1981/…’ – is as much a successor to
Wagnerian music dramas as Mahler’s symphonies are, albeit forcing open a
material tendency to open-endedness that Wagner and Mahler are so adamant to
close. On this occasion, Répons
seemed emphatically to open a new chapter in the composer’s œuvre. Long accused
– unfairly and uncomprehendingly – by those jealous of his extraordinary talent
of having taken refuge in his conducting activities, the composer and his IRCAM
collaborators, who should always be honoured in any discussion of this work,
reimagines not only the relationship between instruments and electronics, but
also, in dramatic instrumental form, the time-honoured liturgical responsorial
relationship between precentor and choir. Hence the
title. Here, lighting – a literally ‘electrical’ response, as it were, to the
end of the quasi-expository Introduction, and the entrance of the soloists and
electronics – played a structural-dramatic role, just as if we had an
intelligent stage director or liturgist on hand.

One example of maintenance of coherence between instrumental and
electronic worlds, to which Andrew Gerzso draws attention in his booklet note
for the CD release, is that of the soloists’ arpeggiated chords. As the
soloists take their turns, so are the chords in turn transformed by
electronics, ‘in such a way that the arpeggiated chords are themselves arpeggiated.
The overall result of the soloists and the transformed sounds together is that
of an arpeggio of an arpeggio of an arpeggio.’ Moreover, the pitches of the
successive arpeggiated chords themselves are all ultimately derived from a
seven-note vibraphone chord, through familiar operations such as transposition
and combination, each instrument taking from another and yet remaining in touch
with the first. Oppositions multiply and, in a sense, attract. Meter returns,
joining and indeed transforming his earlier works’ opposition between ‘smooth’
(chaotic and irregular) and ‘striated’ (regular, repeated notes) time; so does
‘symmetrical’ harmony. Ornamentation and proliferation – the [Paul] SACHER
hexachord ever in the background, not necessarily to be heard – abound.

I quote myself (from the English-language programme note I wrote for
this performance) in the preceding paragraph, not because I have run out of
things to say. (Honestly!) I do so, because reading those words, that is,
almost uncannily, precisely what I heard, albeit within a ‘live’, dramatic,
experiential framework, which made the work sound both known and unknown. In
the words of Hans Sachs, hero of a work Boulez long wished to conduct and yet
which, alas, he never did, ‘Es klang so alt und war doch so neu!’ One will
never quite hear the same work twice, of course, in any situation, but the
open-endedness of something which yet emphatically remains a ‘musical work’
intensifies the exhilaration and the poignancy of the moment.